With the recent innovations of information technology as exemplified by the Internet, e-mails, and inexpensive long distance calls, firms' decision making processes seem to be in transition from top-down approaches to decentralization of decision making authority. Now that the sort of information that only senior executives involved in management could access in the past can be instantly accessed by any employee, it becomes indispensable in competition with other companies that workers at worksites make decisions by themselves as promptly as possible. In this connection, it is important that workers cooperate in a flexible manner to reach an optimum solution in the possible shortest time.
Methods of supporting decision making processes include BSC (Balance Score Card) and the commitment list method. The BSC method emphasizes considerations in the aspects of finance, customer, process, and growth. When a decision is made paying attention to balancing among these aspects, a biased judgment can be avoided. In addition, when quantifiable data such as sales and the number of customers are used as indicators for evaluation (metrics) as far as possible, achievements can be made visible.
The commitment list method is a method of expressing business goals in written form. Specifically, commitment lists include descriptions of goals and undertakings as agreed at meetings or by discussions; and tasks, employees in charge, deadline, dependence on other tasks, conditions, and achievement criteria are written there. These lists should tell who is committed to achieving what kind of goals and how the current situation is. Therefore, information on items and conditions should be updated periodically and accessible.
Also, a method of strengthening cooperation among workers, has been proposed in which e-mails among workers are grasped and analyzed and their interrelations and frequencies are visualized in the form of graphs or the like for use as a reference material for making decisions on organizational change (IBM, “Organizational Communication Diagnosis” http://www-1.ibm.com/services/jp/index.wss/offering/bcs/a10 11037, searched on Oct. 4, 2005). Concretely, which department plays a key role in communications, or conversely which department is responsible for communication trouble are found and the findings may be used as indicators.
In recent years, a network system which uses sensors with a small electric circuit having a wireless communication function to input various types of information from the real world into data processors in real time (hereinafter called a “sensor net”) has been under consideration. Such sensor nets have a wide range of potential applications; one example is a medical application in which patient conditions such as pulsation are constantly monitored using a finger-ring type miniature electronic circuit which integrates a wireless circuit, a processor, a sensor and a battery and a monitoring result is transmitted to a diagnostic device through wireless communications so that a health condition can be checked based on the monitoring result (Sokwoo Rhee et al. “Artifact-Resistant Power-Efficient Design of Finger-Ring Plethysmographic Sensors,” IEEE Transactions On Biomedical Engineering, Vol. 48, No. 7, July 2001, pp. 795-805).